


Under the Eagle's Talon: An Alternate-Historical Spy Novel

by imitatinglife (mouli_sv)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate History, Central Intelligence Agency, Gen, Nazis
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27812668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouli_sv/pseuds/imitatinglife





	Under the Eagle's Talon: An Alternate-Historical Spy Novel

**Chapter 1: Stars, Stripes, and Compromises**

_"Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."_  
-Adolf Eichmann

Langley is cold in winter. The gray buildings of '50s concrete and steel tower over the rest of the Virginian suburbs like squat sentinels, with eyes cast across the foaming seas. Entry takes you across the eagle's eyes engraved in stone, the seal of the CIA staring upwards as if to find a spy.  
  
Good luck to it, perhaps. God knows there's enough spies here.  
  
With the end of the Second World War, there have been spies and assassins in all sorts of places. With the Russians confined past Moscow, with Western Europe under the iron heel of the Third Reich, and with the United States staring it down across the dark Atlantic, there's always a need for spies. They call this the Cold War, the _Kalterkrieg_ waged across walls of nuclear weapons fit to burn the world and staring down an ideologue who would damn mankind. It has taken thousands of dead and thousands more left as burned-out wrecks, with the SS on one side and the CIA and its allies on the other. The forces of freedom, capitalism, and the correct sort of liberty on one side and the Nazis on the other.  
  
It's a rum old world.  
  
You're one of those spies, serving the CIA as a stringer while acting as a journo in the Reich. You've been in and out of the eagle's claws more than once, and there's damn good reason.  
  
No room for heroics, no rescues and great tasks or missions. You get in, you poke around as a journo's expected to, and you collect what drops the embassy points you at. You get out. You drink away what you saw in a bleak German hotel room that bugged to hell and back, and cry your eyes dry on the flight across the Channel to London, past the RAF and the Royal Navy and into the freedom that so many were denied.  
  
You are a part-time field agent for American Intelligence, and yours is the sharp end of the Cold War. All the trauma, the grand drama, and the great tragedies of the spy and their networks. All the heroics that go unrecorded, the idealists and the mercenaries that die in unmarked cells. Yours will with luck never be a _story_ , a great legend that will never see the light of day. It will - God willing - end in a pension, a successful journalism career, and a quiet retirement.  
  
Maybe it'll end with a medal, a secret award given for ducking in and out of stinking Berlin bars and mutely watching things of banal horror. Perhaps it will end in an SS interrogation room, with dark stains on walls and smiling cold-eyed Aryans asking you to _talk_. Hopefully it will end as a pensioner, with stories you cannot tell and a life that's without more Agency work and a well-provisioned retirement.

But whatever it is, you sure wish you didn't take the train. Ever since they cut the federal funding, the rails haven't been the same.

* * *

 **Langley, Virginia  
Headquarters Building   
1962**  
  
A quick flash of ID gets you through the gates, the plainclothes cop on duty eyeing you with more than professional curiosity as you walk past. Your long coat is ransacked for guns and cameras by the lobby detail, and once that's done they decide to let the 'little lady' on through to the conference rooms. The eagle embossed on the floor stares up your coat as you walk across, and the receptionist's quiet giggle as you ask for directions is almost patronizing as she lays it out.  
Before adding in how _sad_ it is that you have that scar on one cheek.  
  
The hallway decor all along your path is institutional beige and stark gray concrete, with tiling clicking under your shoes as the almost-all-male analysis staff at Intelligence HQ turn to take a look and almost ask if you're sure you're in the right place - priority ID clipped to your lapel or no.  
  
The conference room is similar in one sense, bare furniture and bare walls with a projector and slide deck on one end of the table and Deputy Director of Operations Gianni Schiavelli on the other end with two cups of coffee.  
Lovely.  
  
You drop your bag on one chair, take a cup and collapse into another chair while slurping down some caffeine. Gianni makes a face at that, but eh. You're damn tired; it's been a twelve-hour drive here through winter weather and traffic jams in Washington.  
  
The Deputy Director seems to come to a decision while you sit, and opens things up by sliding across a folder marked SECRET: ORCHESTRA/WHITE. You flip it open and find a square face with combed-back black hair staring out at you from large eyes, almost expressive ones. The photo's in gray, marked in pen as '1938'. You take one look at it, one look at the map on the other page with the outline of RK Moskau, and glare at Schiavelli. "Is this your idea of a _joke_ , Director?"  
  
"No." He grimaces, "We've lost contact with two of our affiliate groups since last month, and the Russians aren't helping."  
  
"They can't. You know that. They're stuck on the other end of the Urals and funded by the damn Chinese-"  
  
"And we can't change that." You get cut off almost gently, the Director not liking it any more than you do. "The President doesn't want compromise, and we're not going to do it. Period. Those are _orders_ , Freide."  
  
"Mm." You don't add that you're a stringer, a travel journalist who works part time for damn near nothing, and Schiavelli doesn't bring it up. "Then what d'you want from me? I was in Berlin two months ago and I can't exactly go back in and cover the Volkshalle again. Damn thing wasn't popular the _first_ time."  
  
Schiavelli nods, old man's eyes in a middle-aged face seeming to understand that's not the only reason you're not chancing Berlin again. You almost damn him for his understanding, sitting here in America while you went in and saw the slaves and the horror up close...but that isn't fair to him or you.  
  
You know what you signed on for.  
  
The Deputy Director lets the silence fill the air while he sips his coffee and you read the file on this 'Sergei Korolev', and starts to talk once he's done. "Six weeks ago we had word from one of our affiliate groups in Moskau that there had been a raid on a labor camp. A fairly high-security labor camp, and quite a few of the prisoners got out."  
  
"And made their way to the Soviets? After all, most of those partisans are using SVTs and seven sixty-two."  
  
"Not quite. One group was to attempt to, and failed. They made contact with another bunch who we have contact with, and dropped word that they were going dark."  
  
"And you want me to contact them in _Moskau_?" Is he insane? "You're aware that the entire damn RK is full of partisans and SS, right? It's all but a warzone."  
  
"Except for the Warsaw-Moskau Corridor and the heavy-rail links."  
  
"Which are monitored with almost as many SS as the Volkshalle."  
  
"We're not asking you to sabotage those, lucky you." Gianni's lips twitch up in a sardonic smile stillborn, "We want you to make contact with the guys who left the dead drops near the Finnish Legation in Moskau."  
  
"The Finns are allowing this?"  
  
"They're acting as intermediaries in exchange for...concessions."  
  
"And why the hell is a stringer getting this? I'm not one of your shining field boys." A trace of the Texan drawl you worked hard to suppress earlier creeps in, emotion and a desire not to _die_ taking precedence over calm.  
  
"Because you're the last one we have in-theater who has a legend ready to go, speaks Russian and German, and has contacts in the partisans."  
  
"Who are all near the Urals."  
  
"Close enough. You know Tolbukhin, and that'll get you a safe way out if you need it." He's right, damn him. But still...you don't want to go to Moskau. The photos were bad enough, the graves and the demolitions. The dropping of St. Basil's, the weeping Russian with a sledgehammer and a laughing trooper with a gun at his back.  
  
"I'm not taking it. I'm not heading to Moskau, Director." And he can shove it.  
  
Gianni being himself, of course, has a counterargument. "We have a foolproof cover to get you to Moskau, and get there intact to boot. You're fine on that score, Miss Freide. And as for the mission..well, Korolev is important. Extremely important."  
  
"How so?"  
  
"Ballistic missile designer important do you?"  
  
Shit. "So you have nobody to send in to respond to a _ballistic missile designer_ escaping slave camps except _me_." Jesus.  
  
"Yep." The Director takes another sip of the coffee, "And boy, do I regret it."  
  
"So what's my cover?" If this is what he says it is...fuck it. You'll go. And you'll ditch and run the moment things get too hot, because you've seen what happens to heroes.  
  
The DDO knows that, and you don't need to say it. He's seen what happens to heroes as well. There's an itinerary in the file, the destination staring at you. A terribly familiar one, marked off in typewritten lettering that seems coldly, starkly angular. 

_Brest_.

_ Author's Note: This began as a CYOA-type thing on another website, and grew from there, hence the use of second person. Feedback welcomed and requested. _


End file.
